My Internet at home doesn't feel as fast as the Internet at my college even though it's faster

[bobfreeman]

At home I have a gigabit fiber connection from at&t and speedtest.net says I'm getting about 945 megabits per second, but whenever I visit a website or enter a url it takes like 2 seconds to load. At my college speedtest.net says that the speed is around 850 megabits per second, but whenever I click on something it's instantaneous and snappy with basically no loading time. If there are less megabits per second why does it feel so much faster?

[Enderman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(networking_utility)

[ThinkWithPortals]

6 minutes ago, bobfreeman said:

At home I have a gigabit fiber connection from at&t and speedtest.net says I'm getting about 945 megabits per second, but whenever I visit a website or enter a url it takes like 2 seconds to load. At my college speedtest.net says that the speed is around 850 megabits per second, but whenever I click on something it's instantaneous and snappy with basically no loading time. If there are less megabits per second why does it feel so much faster?

What's your ping at home vs your ping at college? That's what actually matters for loading websites.

[done12many2]

Just now, bobfreeman said:

At home I have a gigabit fiber connection from at&t and speedtest.net says I'm getting about 945 megabits per second, but whenever I visit a website or enter a url it takes like 2 seconds to load. At my college speedtest.net says that the speed is around 850 megabits per second, but whenever I click on something it's instantaneous and snappy with basically no loading time. If there are less megabits per second why does it feel so much faster?

 

What's the latency on that connection?  Your college may have a better latency (ping).  Also they may have slightly less hops to whatever you are trying to connect to.

[bobfreeman]

3 minutes ago, done12many2 said:

 

What's the latency on that connection?  Your college may have a better latency (ping).  Also they may have slightly less hops to whatever you are trying to connect to.

 

3 minutes ago, ThinkWithPortals said:

What's your ping at home vs your ping at college?

Speedtest.net says my home ping is 2 ms, and the college ping is 5 ms

[manikyath]

the college is most likely plugged straight into a big node, your home connection is most likely a few nodes away from a big node, so it needs more hops before it reaches the location the website is hosted at.

[done12many2]

2 minutes ago, bobfreeman said:

 

Speedtest.net says my home ping is 2 ms, and the college ping is 5 ms

 

You may just have a shorter hop to the closest Speedtest.net server from home than from the college.  As far as regular internet surfing, you probably have less hops at the college.

 

With simple things like web surfing, 900+ Mb/sec doesn't really make your web surfing any faster.  It's all in the amount of hops and routing.

[ThinkWithPortals]

1 minute ago, bobfreeman said:

 

Speedtest.net says my home ping is 2 ms, and the college ping is 5 ms

Could be that your home network has to hop through more servers to reach a URL than the college network. Not much you can really do about that.

[manikyath]

now that i think of it, most of that 'latency' may be the DNS lookup happening, chances are your college has their own, or is very close to their DNS server of choice.

[Enderman]

8 minutes ago, bobfreeman said:

 

Speedtest.net says my home ping is 2 ms, and the college ping is 5 ms

Use tracert to measure latency.

http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/troubleshooter/traceroute.html

[Mr.Meerkat]

7 minutes ago, manikyath said:

now that i think of it, most of that 'latency' may be the DNS lookup happening, chances are your college has their own, or is very close to their DNS server of choice.

5 second difference for loading anything thing...this me comparing Talktalk's own DNS server and Google's DNS servers...(as in talktalk's own DNS servers are rubbish and are slow)

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Use tracert to measure latency.

http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/troubleshooter/traceroute.html

should probably add that A LOT of big places turn off replying to tracert, to spend less work on "useless" traffic.

[manikyath]

Just now, Mr.Meerkat said:

5 second difference for loading anything thing...this me comparing Talktalk's own DNS server and Google's DNS servers...(as in talktalk's own DNS servers are rubbish and are slow)

my ISP accidentially bricks theirs every so often, which is why i'm on google DNS

[Enderman]

Just now, manikyath said:

should probably add that A LOT of big places turn off replying to tracert, to spend less work on "useless" traffic.

Yeah but he only needs to do the test once with one site from both home and college, not all sites.

I usually just do google.com.

[Quindor]

I can think of two things:

• They have an enterprise grade router able to setup connections much faster then your home setup can
• They have a local DNS server able to respond much faster to all requests then your home setup can

Especially with my local DNS cache I can notice a very big difference in surfing speeds. I also have a completely overpowered router but that should be of less influence.

 

So even though latency is the same or even better on your connection if it needs to do 12 resolve requests for one website and these take 5ms each or less then 1ms each, you will certainly notice it!

[leadeater]

Business connections have much lower latency and have priority QoS over residential connections. ISP's also cheat and make sure www.speedtest.net tests look really awesome but those don't really reflect at all what you actual speeds are to general websites.

 

Open developer tools in Google Chrome using F12 and load a page, look in the networking tab for the total load time then do the same at College.

 

Business also have proxy servers/firewalls that do content caching.

[Mark77]

Here's another theory.  Most big campus users are running transparent proxies these days.  AT&T may not be.  So when you're on campus, you might just be loading your web pages from a transparent proxy located on the campus network and transparently redirected.  While when you're "at home", you have to load the web page from the actual server. 

 

Alternatively, it may very well be the other way around, AT&T running a transparent proxy, while the campus network doesn't bother. 

 

And yes, a campus DNS infrastructure would probably have many, many more entries cached than even a home-based DNS caching server (ie: dnsmasq) would have.  Simply because of a much greater diversity of users. 

 

Another theory -- typically GPON (the technology used for most FTTH) is shared infrastructure, where the 2.4gbit is split amongst 20-50 users and has some portion of the bandwidth usually devoted to TV, voice telephone, etc.  While many university campuses have truly impressive networking gear and capacity. 

 

Yet another theory -- your college has some sort of content filtering, removing ads before they're viewed on the client machines.  While you don't have that on your AT&T connection.  I run a DNS-based content filter on my home network, and it increases the speed of web surfing quite dramatically.  My relatives, when they visit with their older tablets or laptops, are amazed at how fast my Internet is -- its really the ad blocking that makes things blazingly fast!

[WINcon_Gaming]

There's also the possibility that your college is using a Riverbed to cache frequently viewed web pages to reduce traffic over the WAN and keep it on your LAN. This is the difference of your PC reaching out to a server in god knows where versus it pulling the requested web page from the local traffic optimizer and delivering it over the LAN which greatly reduces total round trip time for your browsing.

 

Based on your download speeds and latency I would say this is the most likely case. You could always give your college's IT department a call and ask them, it's not a secret by any means in most IT department's eyes.